I was driving along the other day, pushing the buttons on my car radio, when I heard Rush Limbaugh holding forth about Stanton Peele.

This should be fun, I thought. Peele is a psychologist from Morristown who is a renegade in the field of addictive behavior. He has taken on the big bureaucracy that has grown up around addiction with his argument that addiction is not a disease and abstinence is not necessarily a cure. He’s appeared on TV arguing against various nanny-state liberals, while getting the support of such conservatives as Pat Buchanan.

Limbaugh has had his own brush with addiction, so I expected he might be holding forth on some aspect of Peele’s rather conservative views on the subject.

That was not to be. Instead, I listened as Limbaugh launched into an attack on Peele as, of all things, a liberal. It seemed Limbaugh was upset with an interview Peele had given on MSNBC in which Peele was asked to psychoanalyze the tea party movement. Peele told the host that many tea party members engage in classic addictive behavior.

“They’re pursuing goals that can’t be achieved,” Peele said. “The idyllic past that they’re pursuing probably never existed and is certainly not something we can reach right now.”

This earned him 15 minutes’ worth of Limbaugh’s wrath. But when I got him on the phone, Peele defended his view of the tea party movement.

“I think they’re yearning for some sort of halcyon past that just wasn’t there in the first place,” he said. “There’s never been this ideal period in America. A lot of people talk about Colonial times, but how do you like outhouses?”

I’ll take indoor plumbing. And when it comes to the tea party movement, I’m with Peele. The early tea party rallies were a lot of fun. For a moment there, the participants seemed to share the goal of reducing the size of government.

But on closer examination, any agreement was illusory. To balance the budget and avoid tax hikes, you’d have to make big cuts in Medicare and military spending. But a recent Marist-McClatchy Poll showed only 28 percent of tea partiers support cutting Medicare and Medicaid. Only 20 percent support cutting military spending, a CNN poll showed.

“A lot of these people have time to attend these rallies only because they’re on Social Security and Medicare,” said Peele. “It’s an imaginary, almost psychotic point of view. They’re not in touch with reality.”

To that end, the tea partiers keep looking for a candidate who will promise them what they can’t have: big government and low taxes. Last month, they were smitten by Michele Bachmann. This month, they’ve transferred their affections to Rick Perry.

Meanwhile, their websites just get nuttier.

Last week, I got an e-mail from Rob Eichmann, who is a Republican state committeeman from GloucesterCounty. He sent me a copy of a letter he sent to his fellow committee members asking them to take a stand against some of the stuff the tea partiers are sending around.

One example is a tea party website called the Tea Party Advocacy Tracking Hub (tpath.org). Eichmann forwarded me a cached copy of a page on the site that featured one of those Photoshopped images of Obama dressed in a pimp suit.

“When a blogger doctors a photograph of the president, so that he appears to be a pimp from a 1970s exploitation film, that blogger is trying to say in pictures what he dare not say in words,” Eichmann wrote.

Or perhaps he’s just trying to say he’s got the brains of a high school sophomore. The site also contained a link to a site for a birther summit. But best of all, there was a copy of a letter attacking none other than Limbaugh — for failing to endorse the notion that Obama’s mother flew to Kenya 50 years ago for the sole purpose of making sure her son could never become president.

But that wasn’t the funniest thing on the site. The funniest thing was the front page ads: all but one were for Medicare providers.

That’s the real drug problem, said Peele.

“If you really think the tea party’s going to take over and solve our long-term problems, then you must be smoking something,” he said.

COMMENTS: I noticed several commenters failed to read the part of the column in which I noted that tea-partiers show overwhelming support for such essentially socialist programs as Medicare. If you wish to comment in support of the tea parties, please address the issue of how such programs can be funded without tax hikes. And the old "cut waste, fraud and abuse elsewhere" cliche will not do the trick.